MAINTAINING AND
SHOWCASING YOUR
BODY OF WORK
by Vik Orenstein
You thought your big job was going to be creating your images, right? I’ll bet you never dreamed you’d take more time organizing, archiving, showcasing, packaging and just generally handling your originals than you did shooting them. It’s a dirty job, but we’ve all got to do it. Because the way we display our images tells others how we regard our own work. A misfiled, mislabeled or unlabeled original may as well not exist. A corrupt file, a missing file or a file in a format that’s too small and suffers resolution loss each time it’s opened is worse than no file at all. So most of us need to get our images off of our main computer hard drives and onto a backup of some sort. Not only that, but every photographer should have a redundant storage system—one that duplicates your backed-up files. Storage and backup systems can be manual or automatic.
STORAGE
Image files take up a lot of space—especially the large high-quality formats such as RAW, TIFF, and the highest-quality JPEGs. You can very quickly clutter up your computer’s hard drive and use up valuable memory. Not only that, but if your computer crashes (and that happens more often than any of us like to think!), you may lose everything on it. Sure, there are forensic recovery services that can try to retrieve the files for you, but the expense is high and you still might not get everything—or anything—restored.
As a photojournalist and wedding photographer, Stormi Greener has accumulated millions of images over the last thirty years—such as this one made in Afghanistan. Stormi finds digital originals much easier to organize and archive than negatives.
CDs, DVDs, external hard drives, jump drives and raid systems
CDs and DVDs: Before external hard drives became cheap and large (today you can get a terabyte of storage for less than 250GB cost four years ago), CDs and DVDs were popularly used to archive digital images. The drawback to disks is that they are not all created equal, and you can’t tell simply based on how much you paid for them whether you’ve got good ones or bad ones. Regardless of whether your CDs or DVDs are high quality, they won’t last forever. Some even have a life expectancy of less than five years. Not only that, you can easily forget to label them, misfile them, lose them, and scratch them. I don’t recommend using them for storage at all. They are great for delivering e-files to your clients. Beyond that, you need a better solution.
External hard drives: An external hard drive, also called a storage drive, is a great way to back up the images on your computer’s hard drive and to use for long-term storage. I recommend having one for daily backup. I keep all my active image files on my desktop, and I have an automatic system that copies the contents of my desktop to my external hard drive every night at midnight. It overwrites the previous day’s transfer, so if I have to go back to it to find my work, I don’t have to guess which day’s version I find. If you’re a well-organized person, you can manually back up your images each day. But the automatic backup programs are inexpensive, and it’s one less thing to think about if it’s automatically done for you.
Flash drives are small, portable external hard drives. Generally these are used to transfer files from one computer to another, and not for long-term storage.
A RAID (redundant array of independent disks) system automatically saves your images in two or more places, so even if you lose one file, the other still exists. All image files are loaded from the card reader to the desktop of one of the three computers, and from there, immediately to the RAID system. This way, the images are accessible from any of our computers, and they are backed up.
Long-term storage: Every January, I copy all of my image files from the past year onto two separate 250GB hard drives. I keep one onsite and take one to a storage facility. I could get a bigger external hard drive and store more years on each drive—but then if one of them fails I’ve lost even more files. And dividing up the images into tidy one-year groups makes them easier to manage. Some photographers use online services for their off-site storage. I personally prefer to manage all my image storage myself. In the past I’ve had some trouble with archive services, such as difficulties with the image transfer process. External drives are so small and easy to store, and so inexpensive, that I see no reason not to do the archiving myself.
File formats
High-end consumer cameras and professional DSLRs all offer image files in the following formats:
JPEG format comes in a range of quality levels and requires the least amount of storage space. I can get over one thousand JPEG images on the same image card that will only hold 383 RAW images or two hundred TIFF images. JPEG is also the file format used for uploading images to the Internet. JPEG files are not lossless. That means that every time you open a JPEG file, and every time you edit the file and save, you damage pixels and your image suffers some resolution loss. To avoid this loss and to create a lossless original, you should save a version of your JPEG file as a TIFF or PSD (Photoshop document). These formats never suffer damaged pixels from opening, editing and saving.
TIFF is the largest file format. It provides you with an exceptional high-resolution image, but the unwieldy size requires a lot of space on image cards and storage systems. This format was designed for desktop publishing and is still the image format of choice for publishing and offset printers. Some photographic printers are now able to print from TIFF files. TIFF is a lossless file format.
Brenda Tharp uses Photoshop Lightroom to organize and edit her stock images.
PSD (Photoshop document) files are also a lossless format. PSD format allows you to save your images in layers. Layers allow you to have different versions of your image in the same document and to use different tools in Photoshop to create different artistic affects. To save images in every other format, the layers need to be flattened first, so it becomes difficult (and sometimes impossible) to go back and undo editing work. When you save a version of your work as an un-flattened PSD, you can go back to this file again and again and create different versions of your image.
RAW files are incredibly versatile because the information they contain has not been converted into pixels yet. Before the RAW file is opened in Photoshop or any other editing platform, you are able to adjust your exposure up to two-plus stops brighter or darker, crop, adjust white balance, and use a host of other tools, all without causing any loss of resolution whatsoever! There are two drawbacks to the RAW image format. One is the large size of the files. The second is that each camera manufacturer has its own RAW file converter. This forces Adobe to reverse engineer their RAW converters each time Canon or Nikon comes out with a new camera model. Therefore, it’s quite possible that at some time in the future, those RAW images that we have so carefully preserved may become impossible to read.
DNG (digital negative format) was created by Adobe to unify the RAW file format. You can get the latest DNG converter for Mac and Windows free of charge at www.adobe.com.
Many professional photographers shoot in RAW or RAW-plus JPEG for the largest, highest-quality file possible. But those in specialties that require shooting a large number of images in a short time (such as wedding and photojournalism) often shoot in fine JPEG. Do some research and testing to decide which format(s) are right for you.
ORGANIZING
No matter what media you choose to archive your work on, the organization of your files is enormously important. If you can’t find a photo when you need it, it’s worthless!
Portraits, weddings, and special events
Customers are likely to reorder images from time to time, so a retail photographer benefits from archiving his originals in two ways for easy cross reference: by the date they were shot and by the client’s name. If you do more than one shoot for the same client in a given year, a brief description is helpful.
Stock images
If there’s a chance you’ll use your images for stock, you’ll need to organize them by descriptions and categories (keywords). Some stock agencies keyword your images for you, and some require you to keyword them yourself. More keywords equals more sales in the world of stock. There are many excellent software programs to help manage organization and keywording of stock images, from Picassa (a free downloadable program) to Adobe Lightroom.
I use a 250GB RAID system for active images, and external hard drives for “deep” storage. I always keep two sets of originals, one at my studio, and one off-site. I back up my desktop (with all active image orders on it) every day.
Assignment work
Some commercial photographers archive assignment work for their clients. Labeling with the client name, the name of the agency (if applicable), the name or purchase-order number for the job, and the date should keep your ducks in a row.
HANDLING
It’s easy to become casual or even cavalier in the handling of your originals when you do it every day. You can save yourself some huge heartache if you remember to follow a few simple rules when storing, accessing and transferring your images.
• Always back up images immediately. As soon as you move your images from your camera to your desktop, always immediately copy them to another location as well. This could be an external hard drive, a CD or DVD, a RAID system, or even a flash drive.
• Watch that dragging and dropping. The drag-and-drop feature makes filing and accessing your files amazingly easy. Unfortunately, that also makes them enormously easy to lose. I have “lost” entire client files only to find them a year later, tucked into another client’s file. A tiny wrist spasm can move Stein 2008 into Stern 2008 without so much as a splash.
• Always check to be sure a transfer was made. After you transfer those images from your desktop to that DVD or external hard drive, check the DVD or hard drive to be certain the files are all there and intact. Be patient! Don’t click on that file until the transfer is complete or you’ll have to start all over again.
WHAT TO DO WITH YOUR OLD ANALOG ORIGINALS
Most established pros (and amateurs, for that matter) have made the transition from film to digital capture by now. So now we not only have to deal with our current digital work, we have masked negatives and sleeved negatives and mounted slides and assorted prints to deal with. And each take has a client who commissioned it or a stock category it belongs to. Most of them you may never have a cause to look at again. But is it okay to dispose of them?
“I don’t think so,” says sports and commercial photographer David Sherman. “Last summer I had an intern and we spent three months going through all my negatives and offering them to the clients for $25. But you have to consider the price of doing that. Time and labor organizing the images, finding the current addresses of the clients, postage for sending each client a postcard asking them if they want to purchase their negatives, packing them up and mailing them out … even this is expensive. But I’d hate to have someone need their negatives and not be able to have them just because I threw them out.”
I personally have never destroyed or purged a single negative from any of my studios or my personal work. Some clients have come back to me years later for reprints due to personal tragedies, such as divorce, a house fire or the loss of a family member, and they are very grateful for this. The joy of being able to provide these people with photos of their families during a crisis is more than enough compensation for archiving the originals.
Ultimately, you must examine your own point of diminishing returns, i.e., the likelihood that you (or your clients) will at some future time want or need to reuse your originals versus the cost of the space and the labor involved in retaining them. In any case, if you do decide to retain originals, do it right.
• Meticulously label the originals and storage containers with all pertinent data, including the date shot, the client name, the job or P.O. number, and the subject matter.
• Use only acid-free archival storage receptacles.
• Organize your archives in a fireproof, waterproof storage area.
• Consider employing a hierarchal system of archiving similar to that used on most computer programs. More recent or more frequently used originals could be maintained in easy access—even on-site at your studio, with older and less frequently called for images stored off-site or in “deep” storage.
STORAGE FOR VARIOUS ANALOG ORIGINALS AND PRINTS
There are standard ways to store various types and formats of originals that maximize their longevity and minimize potential damage.
Anything needing to be archived, such as photographic originals or prints, should always be stored in sleeves, files, boxes and envelopes that are acid-free. Archival storage products are available at professional photo stores and via mail order or online from such catalogs as Exposures (www.exposuresonline.com).
There are several types of storage systems for 35mm slides. Transparent, acid-free plastic sleeves are designed to hold up to twenty slides and fit nicely into three-ring notebooks for easy perusal. Acid-free cardboard slide boxes hold slides in the original boxes they come in from the lab, or just in the storage box itself without the lab boxes. These are not as convenient as the sleeves, in my opinion, and should be used only for deep storage.
Medium-format transparencies, like 120mm, are most easily stored in acid-free plastic sleeves. These are much like the sleeves used for 35mm transparencies, but they hold twelve images (one roll).
Negatives and transparencies 4×5 and larger are housed each in their own individual acid-free plastic sleeve, and I find the most convenient storage boxes for these to be the boxes the film is packaged in. Additional boxes for this purpose can be purchased at professional camera stores.
Stock photographers not only need to organize and archive their images, they need to label them with as many keywords as possible so that a potential buyer doing a search at a stock agency or on the Internet will be able to find them. For instance, this image by Kerry Drager could be described using the following keywords: birdhouse, sunset, silhouette, pink clouds, sky, and even horizontal and space for text.
Acid is the enemy
Have you ever noticed how old newspapers turn yellow and brittle over time, until there comes a point when they turn to dust at the slightest touch? This is because the paper contains acid, and the acid causes the paper to self-destruct. Or, as an avid archiver once told me, “It eats itself.” The same fate awaits even acid-free photographic prints if they are framed or stored in contact with acid-containing paper mats, file folders, paper envelopes and cardboard boxes. Professional acid-free storage containers cost a little more but are well worth it if you plan on using your originals in the near future or in years down the road. Even if you don’t foresee a use for them now, you may be surprised later.
Roy Blakey was. “After I published my book of male nudes and sold all the copies, I completely forgot about the whole project for almost twenty years,” he says. “I moved to Minneapolis and [the negatives] sat in boxes on the floor in a closet in New York, until one day a colleague found them and said, ‘Hey, Roy, these should be re-released,’ and he helped me find a publisher.
In Photoshop Lightroom, photographers can organize their images not only by categories and keywords but also on a scale of 1 to 5. This feature can save time when it comes to editing the best images for submission to stock agencies and wedding, portrait, commercial, and architectural clients. This image by Jim Zuckerman can fit into many categories.
“The new edition came out thirty years to the day after the first. And it never occurred to me that those images would be revisited until this fellow found them and dug them out.”
Even if you don’t reuse the originals, someone else might. Henry Larsen was a gifted amateur photographer who shot a wild array of subjects in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s—everything from salon-style nudes and pet parades in Iowa to oil slicks on parking lot water puddles. He carefully organized, labeled and archived every negative he ever shot, and when he died these images were passed down to his grandson, who is also a photographer. Many of the images have been reprinted and given various treatments, including hand coloring, to be resold as stock and fine art images. Larsen’s photographs are quirky and whimsical, and they don’t fall into any particular market. He simply shot for the joy of it and never expected his photos to reemerge after his death, becoming a gift to later generations of photo enthusiasts.
Beware the wrath of fire and water
Whether you store your images digitally on disk or archived in plastic sleeves and boxes, your storage space must be reasonably fireproof and waterproof. If you don’t have a lot of originals, they’ll probably fit well in a safe that can be purchased at an office supply store.
For a larger volume of originals, you may want to investigate off-site storage, especially if your studio is in a pricey commercial space (you don’t want to pay retail rent for cold storage).
There are storage companies that specialize in this service, or you might look even closer to home. For instance, the building in which you rent your studio space may have basement or interior space that is undesirable for other uses (and therefore inexpensive to rent) which could be made into adequate fireproof, waterproof storage areas.
PORTFOLIOS
Commercial, architectural and fashion photographers use portfolios, or “books,” as a means to display their work to potential clients. Each market or geographical area will have its own very rigid written and unwritten rules about what is required for the appearance of your book. Expectations and industry norms evolve over time. Often the requirements or standards that describe an adequate book seem ridiculous or unreasonable.
Ten years ago, the last time I had a commercial portfolio, the standard in my market was to show 4×5 transparencies of your ten best images. The transparencies had to be mounted inside two 11×14 sheets of KYDEX—a plastic product used inside of suitcases. There were only two places that you could get it, and it was expensive and very, very difficult to cut. My professional frame shop mounted ten images for me in KYDEX and handed me a hefty bill with a warning never to bring them that stuff again. There was one fellow photographer in town I finally found who would cut KYDEX at a reasonable rate, but right after I found him, he moved to Alaska.
I thought that was about as bad as it could get. But the portfolio requirements in this market now make commercial shooters yearn for the good old days of KYDEX.
Today you have to hire a designer and a bookmaker to create a high-quality bound book for you. The goal is to make a portfolio that looks like a very expensive coffee table book. Forget about the quality of the work inside—the competition is fierce to have the most unusual, best-designed book. The covers are made of everything including, but not limited to, metal, leather, fur, book-making fabric and wood.
“It’s pretty outrageous,” says Lee Stanford. “Especially now that people only call for your book once or twice a year. But you’ve got to do it.”
To find out what the requirements are for portfolios in your market, join the ASMP, call art directors at local ad agencies and ask what they like to see or do some assistant work or informational interviews inside of an established commercial studios to see what kind of books they are showing.
PACKAGING THAT CERTAIN SOMETHING
No matter what your area of specialty, you ultimately deliver something into the hands of your client—either a CD, a proof album, a print or even a framed piece of art. No matter what it is, the way you package it will have an effect on the client’s satisfaction.
Disks and CDs for clients: Present your disks and CDs professionally. “Some photographers deliver disks with the P.O. scribbled on them in Sharpie [permanent marker],” says an ad agency traffic director. “Others have gorgeous matching labels for their envelopes, disks and CD cases. It’s just really classy and it adds value, and also gets people talking around the agency, when the package is nice.”
Portraits and prints: Packaging was never an issue for my KidCapers Portrait Studio because most of our clients purchase framed, finished wall art from us. But in the early days of my Tiny Acorn Portrait Studios, before we did our own framing, clients picked up their hand-colored photographic prints right at the studio. Never one who appreciated the value of good packaging, I had my employees send our prints off with the clients in whatever was handy—photo paper boxes and sleeves, envelopes from the lab, file folders, you name it. Thankfully, a very helpful (albeit disgruntled) client called me to voice her displeasure. “I can’t believe it,” she told me, “I paid so much money for these beautiful hand-painted pictures of my babies and she [my store manager] just threw them in a file folder and tossed them at me!”
Now, I knew the employee well enough to know that she did not treat them with any disregard. But the client perceived a disregard for the portraits on the part of the employee because of the disregard with which I chose the packaging. Thanks to this client, I had packaging printed with our store name and logo and instructions on how to care for the prints while they were in their unframed state.
Wedding portraits: Wedding photographers have built-in packaging in the form of folders, albums and photo boxes. Some wholesale companies, such as Art Leather and ZookBook, offer such beautiful presentation albums, it almost makes me want to get married again (almost being the keyword here). I believe wedding shooters do well to build the cost of a proof book and album or photo box into their fee structure and deliver their product complete—the perceived value is enormous.
And just as awful packaging can make a good product look bad, good packaging can make a great product look even better.
If there is a moral to this story it’s this: The regard with which you display, package and otherwise showcase your images tells others how to regard your work as well. If you spend a little extra thought, planning and sometimes money to present your work in its best light (pun intended!), you’ll be rewarded with a healthier business.
Vik Orenstein is a photographer, writer and teacher. She founded KidCapers Portraits in 1988, followed by Tiny Acorn Studio in 1994. In addition to her work creating portraits of children, she has photographed children for such commercial clients as Nikon, Pentax, Microsoft and 3M. Vik teaches several photography courses at BetterPhoto.com.
Excerpted from The Photographer’s Market Guide to Building Your Photography Business © 2010 by Vik Orenstein. Used with the kind permission of Writer’s Digest Books, an imprint of F+W Media, Inc. Visit writersdigestshop.com or call (800)448-0915 to obtain a copy.